silver sage

There is a cafe in Post Office Place, Glenroy called the Silver Sage. We occasionally ridiculed it from afar because of its strange name and seemingly archaic style, and like a lot of ridicule (from afar in particular) this came from ignorance. Part of the ignorance was, I have to say, invited by SS itself, because if you pass by there in the evening or any other time it's closed, you don't get a very good sense of the fare it offers; you get a sense of a transplanted cafe from Horsham (toasted sandwiches, instant coffee, coke spider, it screams without actually saying as much) with the bench of bad magazines at the front window, and the back wall of the cafe area masking a much older kitchen where god knows what happens. But this morning we went there and it is tops.

The food is not ostentatiously turkish, but that is in fact what it is - or at least that end of the mediterranean. The 'European breakfast', for instance, is (a) oddly labelled 'European', considering it contains olives, cucumber, tomato, fetta and turkish bread,* and (b) there's no b, I summed up the whole thing in (a). The coffee is excellent and the service friendly and remarkably (sorry Glenroy as a whole, all due respect) efficient. We both had European breakfasts, actually, and the olives in particular were grouse - I think perhaps home grown.

Delightfully, the east wall is adorned with artistic pictures of locations in Glenroy, including night shots of the station and the very remarkable library building.

I can't say more, because that's the sum of my Silver Sage experience, but I will say, highly recommended *****.

* Hey I know these are European, they're so European they're European with Wegener on drums, but they're a particular kind of European aren't they, you know what I mean.